It was about noon of the second day that we gradually entered the real Gobi Desert. Yet it was not a desert in the Sahara sense, of mere shifting sand, but of hard sand and gravel mixed with clay, always covered at least with the thinnest of grass, and often with tufts of a grass-bushy sort, enough to keep even a desert from shifting and blowing. Thus far the weather had been cool but glorious; but no sooner had we come to the Gobi, where, as any teacher of geography can tell you, it never rains, than the sky roofed itself over completely with gray-black clouds and rain forced us to halt and contrive some means of raising the top over our ramparts of baggage. Skeletons of cattle, particularly of camels, became more than frequent, blanching into dust closely beside the trail just where the end of their life’s labors had overtaken them. Buzzards that looked more like eagles vied with the wild black dogs in disposing quickly of the carcasses. Nor were the modern rivals of the camel free from a like fate. Several skeletons of automobiles caught our eye, and they were always scattered piece by piece for some distance, as if they had disintegrated at full speed, or their bones, too, had been picked clean and dragged hither and yon by those savage dogs that roam the Mongolian plains. Floor-flat and wide as it is, and almost as free from the “other fellow” as from “traffic cops,” this natural speedway of the Gobi has had a number of fatal automobile accidents.
Unlike the Sahara, it is not merely the camel that can cross the Gobi. Mules and horses make the journey, and the miles-long camel caravans were rivaled by endless strings of ox-carts, the crudest of two-wheeled contrivances, plodding along across the dry, brown world as if all sense of time or destination had long since been cast aside as worthless paraphernalia. Often, especially in the cold early mornings, we passed caravans camped out, perhaps for a day or two, while their weary animals browsed the stingy hillsides. A denim-blue tent backed by scores or hundreds of bales of hides or wool, if the expedition was China-bound, or boxes of food, cloth, liquor, and oil products, if Urga was its destination, with perhaps more uptilted two-wheeled carts than could have been counted during one of our average halts, usually completed such a picture as we came upon it. At the sound of our unmuffled engine tent-doors became alive with gaping, bullet-headed Mongols, lower orders of whom, or their Chinese counterparts, came to life from beneath what had seemed to be mere bundles of felt rags and sheepskins on the cold hard ground, while the horses tethered about the camp with three feet hobbled together after the Mongol fashion made frantic and often successful efforts to escape from this new terror descending upon them. The horses of the Gobi have not yet learned to behold the automobile with equanimity, and our passing often sent great herds of Mongolian ponies sweeping away in chaotic masses across the plains in a stampede which the dozen outriders were powerless to stem.